Cynthia Brand
Cynthia Brand, also known as Scorcher, is a supervillain in the DC Universe. She first appeared in Scare Tactics #3 (February, 1997) and was created by Len Kaminski and Anthony Williams. History Not much is known about Cynthia‘s early life: she was born somewhere in the United States of America, and apparently she was a girl like any other… apart from a small, hidden detail. Since her childhood, in fact, Cindy had the power of pyrokinesis, an ability that made her feel like some sort of freak. When she was still a teenager, she was found and abducted by a secret government group, the R-Complex, a paramilitary organization collecting supernatural “freaks” like her. Cindy was brought in a secret facility in New Mexico, where she became part of Operation Prodigy, a project aimed to study and possibly weaponize supernatural abilities. There were many others unwilling residents in the base, and Cindy became friends particularly with one of them, Arnold Burnsteel, a young man imbued with Egyptian magic who could transform into an arcane demon hunter, Fate. R-Complex performed a number of gruesome experiments on the residents of the lab, but Burnsteel was among the few ones who didn’t give up, and he organised a massive escape, involving Cindy as well. The day of the “prison” break, however, something went wrong, and Burnsteel escaped with only four other inmates; Ciny Brand, unfortunately, wasn’t among them, and she was left behind. Feeling betrayed, desperate and scared, Cindy was now alone, still trapped in the hell she had wanted to feel from. Years passed, and Cindy’s life didn’t get any better, quite the opposite. In order to punish her for helping the others escape, and to break her spirit to prevent any other breakout attempt, R-Complex performed even more gruesome experiments on her, and the personnel also physically and psychologically tortured her. All Cindy’s anger focused on Burnsteel and her other friends, since they had abandoned her in New Mexico. When her psyche had been manipulated enough, R-Complex made her chose: either she started working for them, thus putting a stop to the tortures, or she lived the way she had done so far for some other years; for the young woman, that was a no-choice, and she became one of their operatives, codename Scorcher. As an R-Complex agent, Scorcher had one task: to hunt down and capture Bursnteel and the other escapees, who were hiding in plain sight as the rock band Scare Tactics. Scorcher led a team of human agents, and she managed to find her former fellow prisoners in Boston, during a tournee. Apart from Burnsteel, the team counted werewolf Jake Ketchum, vampire Nina Skorzeny, the sludge monster Philbert Hoskins and humanoid reptile James Tilton: they took care with no effort of the agents, but they were no match for Scorcher, who had years of anger and grudge to vent on them, and who had been trained properly to counter her former friends’ powers. When she was about to have them captured, however, some words from Burnsteel made them come back to her senses, and she realized she didn’t want anybody else to suffer the same things she had to, not even the ones who had abandoned her. Making a choice, Scorcher let the Scare Tactics go… preparing to become a fugitive herself, pursued by the same men her “enemies” were escaping from. Arrowverse Scorcher appears in the 2015 TV show Supergirl, played by Nadine Crocker. An Infernian extremist who tried to assassinate president Olivia Marsdin, due to the alien amnesty act. Category:Redeemed Category:Female Category:Tragic Category:DC Villains Category:Comic Book Villains Category:Murderer Category:Terrorists Category:Supervillains